Cleveland Browns

By: Terry Pluto.

Why?

Why, more than four long decades after your team's last championship . . . despite a relentless pattern of heartbreak, teasing, and more heartbreak . . . capped with a decade of utter futility . . . do you still stick with the Cleveland Browns?

Good question.

Veteran sportswriter Terry Pluto gets a daily barrage of email from fans letting their hearts bleed out orange and brown. So he decided to ask his readers: Just what is it about this team that makes you love them, hate them, and still keep coming back for more?

A thousand fans responded—in detail. Their stories—along with interviews with former players and Pluto's own expert analysis—deliver the answer. Answers, actually. Because like any intense relationship, it's a little complicated . . .

Covering the Browns from 1964 through present day, this book does for Cleveland football what Pluto's classic about the Indians, The Curse of Rocky Colavito, did for Cleveland baseball: It won't make the pain go away, but it might help you remember why it's worth enduring.

By: Chuck Heaton.

By: Jonathan Knight.

It's far too easy to allow the national media and disparaging fans to undermine Clevelanders' views of their professional sports teams. While the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers have certainly caused more than their fair share of frustration and heartbreak over the past century, there are countless moments of glory in the fertile athletic history of Northeast Ohio that receive little notice east of Shaker Heights or west of Rocky River. Jonathan Knight's Classic Cleveland Series sets out to combat this trend, bundling together the most memorable moments of Cleveland's beloved athletic clubs. In three separate publications, Knight ranks the fifty greatest games in each franchise with entertaining accounts of each contest, properly placing them in the broad landscape of civic history.

Regardless of what the current editions of the Browns, Indians, and Cavs accomplish, every contest played is another chapter in an epos connecting each generation of fans to the ones before it. The Classic Cleveland Series colorfully illustrates that regardless of today's final score, the simple continuation of the saga is reason enough for reflection and celebration.

Classic Browns counts down the fifty greatest Cleveland Browns games, from unexpected upsets to incredible comebacks to titanic championship battles. The rich, six-decade history of the Browns is layered into these tales, tying together the gritty All-American Football Conference games played in the shadow of World War II to the sleek Sunday battles at shimmering Cleveland Browns Stadium today.

Knight ranks heartbreakers like The Fumble and The Drive alongside championship duels and epic confrontations with heated rivals. Included in these pages are the heroics of Browns legends like Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Jim Brown, Brian Sipe, and Bernie Kosar to name just a few. Whether it was because of the score, the weather, or an amazing individual performance, each game included in Classic Browns is worth remembering and revisiting.

Sure to spark interest and debate, Classic Browns will appeal to Browns fans everywhere.

By: Scott Huler.

By: Terry Pluto.

They were a team of men in the truest sense of the words, men who didn’t expect to be coddled, men who didn’t believe the world should genuflect at the mere mention of their names.

They had the greatest running back in the history of football, and a coach who wore a hearing aid. Their quarterback had a Ph.D. in math. They had a defensive end who was a preacher, and a halfback who became a millionaire. Together, they won it all.

These were the 1964 Cleveland Browns.

Back before Free Agency, before shoe contracts and end zone dances, football was a tough game played by men who loved it. They had real jobs in the off season, as insurance salesmen or ­manufacturers’ representatives, and they lived in the community where they played. They were grateful to the fans for their support and believed that nothing they accomplished was important unless the team won.

In this nostalgic look back, sportswriter Terry Pluto tells the remarkable story of the upstart AFC Cleveland Browns’ surprise championship victory over the hugely favored Baltimore Colts and the colorful players who made that season so memorable. He takes us through the entire 1964 season from training camp at Hiram College to the championship game in Municipal Stadium. Along the way he recreates an era and a team for which pride was not just a slogan.

By: Terry Pluto.

By: Mary Schmitt Boyer.

By: Frank M. Henkel.

By: Jonathon Knight, J. Knight.

Every longtime Cleveland sports fan knows about "Red Right 88," the play that ended the Browns' 1980 season. Quarterback Brian Sipe's ill-fated throw, intended for tight end Ozzie Newsome, was intercepted by Oakland in the end zone, bringing to a halt Cleveland's "kardiac" campaign.

In Kardiac Kids Jonathan Knight paints a portrait of the Browns' storybook 1980 season and its impact on the city of Cleveland. Knight takes us through that unforgettable year from beginning to end, describing in great detail how the city simply fell in love with this team.

Though the Cleveland Browns boast four world championships and possess a rich and respected past, the magical 1980 season was clearly the most memorable in team history. Kardiac Kids is a tribute to that team.

By: Jonathon Knight.

Before Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore, and before the frustrating expansion years and countless front office mistakes of the twenty-first century, there were the Browns of the late 1980s. The years 1985 to 1989 saw the Cleveland Browns explode out of a decade and a half of inconsistency and mediocrity to win four American Football Conference Central Division titles and make the playoffs five straight years. Twice they came within inches of a Super Bowl appearance, led by an unforgettable cast of characters Cleveland embraced and still cherishes. These teams are perhaps the most memorable in the history of Cleveland professional sports.

Sundays in the Pound traces quarterback Bernie Kosar's winding path from Youngstown to Florida to Cleveland, explains why there was so much more to running back Earnest Byner than one unforgotten fumble, and reveals how cornerback Hanford Dixon created a canine phenomenon in the endzone stands that has persevered to this day. Author Jonathan Knight delves into "the Drive" and "the Fumble"; examines the fairy-tale performance of an aging veteran quarterback who directed the Browns through the snow and into the playoffs in his final game at the old, cavernous Cleveland Stadium on Lake Erie's shoreline; and recounts an epic playoffs saga in which the Browns staged one of the greatest comebacks in the history of Cleveland sports.

Cleveland Browns fans throughout the country fondly remember the "Dawg Days," and they will welcome Sundays in the Pound.